by Juno Rushdan
“Oh my God. You’re crazy! You’ll get me killed. Let me out!” She slapped the window, tugging on the door handle, her hysteria ratcheting higher with each passing second.
“Settle down.” His tone was pure business, but he tried to soften the natural abrasion to calm her. “Those guys were following us. Tracking you. I had to lose them. You’re safe now.”
“I won’t be safe until I’m on a plane out of the country. I was fine for the last two days. On my own. Stop the car!”
“Tell me what you know about Z-1984, who those guys are, and why they want you dead.”
“Go to hell.” She grabbed the wheel and yanked it, causing the car to swerve.
Was she insane?
Castle wrestled the wheel, regaining control, and swatted her hands off.
Wow. She was strong.
“Tell me why you need me, and don’t give me any national security crap. How’d you know I’d be at the park?”
“We intercepted IRC messages between you and Gary about Z-1984. The last one spelled out the details—”
“For the meeting.” Shaking her head, she sighed. “How did you know which park? I was deliberately vague.”
“Didn’t. We had operatives at every park near Massachusetts Avenue.” Drained their manpower to do it too. “Try to relax. I’ll answer all your questions.” Most of them, anyway. Okay, probably less than fifty percent. He needed to gather intel, not share it with someone linked to stolen bioweapons. “I’ll clear things up at headquarters.”
After she signed a nondisclosure agreement and they determined her role in this, the chief would decide what to clue her in on.
“Headquarters of what? Where? Langley? Are you CIA? What right do you have to take me anywhere?” she asked in a scorching flash without pausing for air.
The answer to every question except the last was classified, right down to their agency. “Why don’t you answer a few of my questions, starting with your full name?”
An indignant chin lifted as she folded her arms, pinching her lips, and faced the window. It was surprising how good petulance looked on her.
“No need to do this the hard way.” He lightened his tone. “This can be easy.”
“I get the feeling nothing about you is easy and everything is hard.”
Well, she was right on that account, but he quirked a brow at the double entendre.
“If you don’t know who I am, then you don’t know squat.” She glared at him. “And you certainly don’t have a warrant to pluck me off the street and shove me into a locked vehicle. I’m warning you. Let me out, or things are going to get ugly.”
“If you don’t calm down, I’ll be forced to calm you down.”
Those crazy-beautiful eyes glinted like serrated steel. “If you don’t stop this car, you’ll regret it. I’m at a five right now, mister, poised to go to a ballistic ten.”
Hot damn, who was this woman? “Remember, I offered you the easy way.”
Easier for her. Any of his other choices were better for him—quieter, safer, and would prevent her from hurting herself or causing an accident. Or making his head explode from her high-volume demands.
“Let me show you my ID.” He raised a hand and slowly reached over to the glove compartment. Sometimes his size intimidated women, and he was mindful not to heighten any potential fear. Except she didn’t cringe, stilling him with surprise for a second.
Then again, she seemed the type who defied most expectations.
As he let a measured grin surface in a gesture of peace, she launched a fist at his windpipe. He deflected the sucker punch, thanks to lightning reflexes.
If it had landed, that blow would’ve hurt. A lot.
“Stop. Hitting. Me,” he said with the glacial hardness that would make men larger than him back down.
This sprite of a woman rolled her eyes and jerked up from her seat toward him.
“Let. Me. Go.” She clenched her jaw, drawing her face dangerously close to his, her nose damn near touching his cheek.
He white-knuckled the wheel and stared straight ahead. To take him on considering her disadvantage, she must be batshit crazy. Oddly enough, he kind of liked it.
Castle stretched his arm out in front of her, nudging her back into her seat. He reached cautiously for the glove box, as if she were a cornered wild thing capable of ripping into him the split second he dared to blink. He grabbed the Department of Homeland Security badge they used as their cover story in a pinch and tossed it in her lap.
While she looked it over, he popped open the detainment kit. Inside was an autoinjector loaded with drugs strong enough to tranquilize an elephant. Beside that was a transdermal sedation patch the size of a thumbnail. The mild sedative was less potent than benzodiazepines, such as Xanax and Ativan, meant solely to relax an agitated detainee, but with the spitfire’s heart condition, the first option would kill her. Even the second was a calculated risk.
Not willing to take the chance, he shut the kit. If she didn’t settle down after seeing the DHS badge, he’d have to go with the next best alternative, but she wasn’t going to like it.
“I don’t care if you’re a secret agent.” She tossed his badge on the dash. “It doesn’t prove you’re a good guy. Stop the car, or so help me, you’ll wish like hell that you had.”
Guess it was going to be option C. He took Independence Avenue to the West Potomac Park and pulled over in an isolated, unpaved spot for turnarounds. Castle popped the locks, caught his detainee before she bolted—not that she’d have gotten far—and wrangled her into the back seat next to Achilles.
“What are you doing?” She tried to pry his hand loose, scratching and clawing him, but when that failed, she thrust a bony elbow into his jaw.
Son of a bitch. That stung.
“I’m not going to hurt you.” He restrained her wrists with flex-cuffs and secured them to the grab handle above the window with a second nylon zip tie.
“And I’m just supposed to believe the mountain of muscle binding my hands?”
“Why don’t you tell me your name?”
“Bite me!” She kicked his thigh, getting way too close to his groin with her boot heel.
The pain would’ve been compounded by the raging hard-on he had from the mainlined adrenaline. It was nonsexual in nature. But he often channeled this sort of rush when he was with a woman. It was easier to get off redirecting the buzz than deriving pleasure solely from the act itself and forget about the intimacy of making a connection beyond the physical. An ugly memento from the PTSD that had booted him from the Navy SEALs.
“Kick me again and I’ll restrain your ankles too.” Nothing like a woman who wouldn’t take shit from anyone, not even him, but he drew the line at having his family jewels damaged. “I’m sure fighting me can’t be good for your heart.”
“What do you care?”
“I don’t want you dying on me. At least not before I get answers.” He pulled out a black hood from the center console.
Panic seized her face. “Wait, wait, wait.” She looked uncertain about what to say next. “They killed everyone.”
“Who? Those men? Who did they kill?”
Her eyes turned glassy. “If you’re not going to let me go, Castle, don’t let them get me.”
Even in the riotous haze of gunfire and a mad dash for her life, she had remembered his name. “I won’t.”
“I’m not a criminal. I haven’t done anything wrong. Please don’t take me to a black site. Please.”
Poor woman had serious hang-ups about the government. Too bad he sucked at convincing her she had no need to fear him. “Relax. I won’t let anything happen to you. I’m one of the good guys.”
A tear leaked from the corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek. “Prove it.”
His chest constricted at how terrified and stricken she suddenl
y looked. He wasn’t a people person, trained to do candy-ass sweet talk. He was the muscle, a blunt instrument—albeit one with a brain.
There were others in the Gray Box better equipped for coddling—easygoing Reece, smart-ass Alistair, even femme-fatale Maddox when it suited her objective.
“If you’re innocent in all this, I’ll keep you safe. I swear on my life.” He didn’t take oaths lightly, but something about the genuine shift in her from fight to fear ramped that primal urge to protect her into high gear.
Her terrified gaze dropped to the hood in his hand. “Don’t put that on me.”
“Afraid I have to.” Protocol for bringing in a detainee was to protect the location of the Gray Box. No exceptions. “But I won’t gag you if you promise not to scream anymore.”
Trembling, she nodded.
Hating what he had to do next because it was likely to spike her already high level of anxiety into overdrive, he put the black hood over her head.
She shuddered and the frantic whimper that came from her made his chest ache.
But he tamped it down with ruthless efficiency and focused on what mattered most—the mission.
05
Northern Virginia
10:45 a.m. EDT
Next to losing all the people she loved, this was Kit’s greatest fear. A gun-wielding government agent blindfolding her and carting her off to an undisclosed location, where no one might ever see or hear from her again. This was worse than dying.
Sounded crazy. Insane-asylum-level paranoia. But it happened in the coder community. It had happened to Simon “the Wyrm” Peterson. He’d created and tested a program that someone in one of the alphabet-soup agencies had deemed a threat to national security, and he vanished. The Wyrm was a cautionary tale, her barometric guide to steer clear of the black-hat world.
The Outliers changed lives and found kick-ass ways to thwart Big Brother, only dipping their toe over the line. They were legends in the coder community.
Kit’s chest tightened. The Outliers had changed lives. Had and never would again.
All the real coding talent in her biological family had gone to her twin brother, Kyle. After what happened to him, Kit had formed the Outliers. She’d handpicked every lonesome, gifted white-hat hacker with skills far outshining hers, guided them with a vision, and gave them a purpose. A sense of belonging that Kyle had lacked.
Little good it’d done any of them. Now they were gone, just like her brother.
A hollow emptiness sank through her. Tears stung her eyes, but she beat them back, willed them not to fall. The weak cried, and these days, it was survival of the strongest.
There was one thing in her favor. Secret agent man didn’t know her name or the extent of the Outliers’ link to Z-1984. Whatever it was. She heard him searching her bag while they were on the road. But he wouldn’t find any clue to her identity in there. She’d ditched her cell phone, afraid Bravo might use it to track her, and had stashed her license along with the hard drives. Her credit cards were left behind at the loft, and she had subsisted off the limited cash in her bag. All for the best, really, because if she’d used any of her cards—swiped at a hotel for incidentals, an ATM machine, paying the bill at a restaurant—her digital trail could’ve been traced.
The Herculean effort was all for naught, considering Bravo had found her anyway and now she was zip-tied in the back of a government vehicle.
Anonymity was her sole protection against whatever supersecret organization she was dealing with at this point.
If the CIA, Homeland Security—whatever spooky agency the badass driving worked for—suspected she’d aided terrorists, there was no telling what could happen to her. This wasn’t guilt by association. The Outliers was her group. Her family. And she was the only one still breathing.
Responsibility for their actions fell on her.
There was also suspicious data stored on the hard drives, information regarding the other individuals and businesses they’d helped. Nothing illegal per se, but any of the apps and programs they used to circumvent the ever-invasive eyes and ears of the NSA could be twisted. Misconstrued. The hard drives needed to stay out of government hands.
She roped in a breath to quell her spiraling terror.
The dog had put his head in her lap shortly after Castle had bound and blindfolded her. She was already hot, and the mangy beast’s body heat was only making her legs sweat.
“We’re almost there,” Castle said.
They’d been driving about thirty minutes, give or take. A renewed fight kindled in her veins, but she needed to think before she spoke, choose each word carefully this time.
“It’s getting hard to breathe with this hood.” Sweat dripped down her temples, her lungs tight like there was a boulder on her chest, and her heart was beating so hard it ached. That was really bad. “Can you take it off?”
“In a minute.”
The dog lifted his head from her thighs and panted. Then he started whining as if vocalizing his empathy.
“Please. I need air.”
Their speed slowed and Castle stopped the car. He removed the hood and clipped the plastic ties binding her wrists. She put a hand over her eyes, adjusting to the light.
Castle sat back in his seat and threw the car in drive.
The mutt panted, tongue dangling, and then licked her face. She was grateful for his support but shied away from the excess of saliva and wiped her cheek.
They headed down an isolated road along a river, maybe the Potomac. A gated compound surrounded by a ten-foot brick fence came into view. They drove past a sign that read Helios Importing & Exporting and a few others warning against trespassers toward a stone gatehouse about the size of a tollbooth.
Her eyes fixed on the solid black gate straight ahead. What if she went in there and never came out? What if they locked her up until she cooperated? Tortured her for information?
Who would look for her? Who would miss her?
No one. If Kit died today, no one would care.
“This isn’t a black site,” Castle said as if reading her mind, “but the location is classified.”
The confines of the SUV seemed to magnify him. His neck, his heavily muscled arms, his hands, his tree-trunk thighs. Everything about him was big and thick and more than a little intimidating. And with that face—a jaw that could cut glass, straight nose, strong chin—he was also stupid hot.
“I’ll be with you the entire time.” His deep, calm voice was a surprising comfort, but she wasn’t idiotic enough to relax a single muscle. “I promise.”
She wasn’t going to allow this government thug to lull her into a false sense of security and have her spilling her guts. No sirree. Despite her current shabby appearance and the way she oozed desperation, she was not now, nor would she ever be, easy.
“If that’s supposed to make me feel better,” she said, “it doesn’t.” Half lie. “But the best lawyer money could buy would.” One hundred percent true.
“Unless you’re guilty of something, you have no reason not to cooperate. Be honest and everything will be fine.”
Honest? Ha. Easy to preach honesty when you had a badge and gun. She had five valid reasons not to cooperate, and each one had worked on something that’d gotten them killed.
She glanced around. “What’s with the civilian business front?” she asked, gesturing to the sign that read Helios Importing & Exporting.
“It’s our cover.” He rolled down his window, waved to the guard in the gatehouse, swiped a card through an identification reader, and entered a PIN. “You won’t find any record of it after you leave, no matter how deeply you dig. And the compound doesn’t show up on Google Earth if you try to do aerial recon. So don’t waste your time looking for it.”
One thing registered: after you leave. Like she had a shot of being released. But government shadows were shady
and probably did whatever was necessary to elicit cooperation.
Even lie.
The black gate slid open slowly like it was heavy, possibly armored. Castle drove in, adhering to the posted sign warning against exceeding thirty-five miles per hour. Concrete barriers bordered the road a few hundred yards, giving way to giant shade trees. Shiny, circular metal disks dotted the tree-lined road in a zigzag pattern.
“We’re not CIA or Homeland Security. We’re not affiliated with any of the other agencies,” he said, offering more unprompted information.
She opened her mouth to ask the questions whirling in her mind, but he held up a hand.
“Before you ask, I can’t tell you who we are. Not yet. Need you to sign an NDA first.”
The concept of a nondisclosure agreement wasn’t new. Some clients used those to protect sensitive, personal information. Shouldn’t surprise her the government would as well, but maybe it was a sign they intended to let her go. Provided they didn’t learn about her connection to the Outliers and whatever they’d been involved in that’d gotten them all killed.
The serene landscape of the compound looked like a community college campus, with giant old trees, mature shrubs, and what appeared to be several acres of lawn. Barring common sense, she would’ve relaxed at the picturesque setting.
“If I had questions for the FBI or CIA, I know exactly where to find them, including a hotline number to call. Why hide who you are? Go to the extreme of masking your location from satellite coverage?”
“What we do is dangerous,” he said. “We put our lives on the line to keep this country safe, handling operations too tough or politically sensitive for other agencies to tackle. Exposure of any kind, like putting a big sign out front advertising who and what we really are, would endanger us and our families and limit our ability to do our job. Which some days feels impossible. Understand?”
She hated not knowing exactly who or what she was dealing with, much less not having geocoordinates. But she understood the low-profile precautions necessary for the Mission: Impossible gang to do their job.